Depp and meaningful

Time was when Johnny Depp was the king of indie cinema, a hard-drinking, drug-using icon of crazy-sexy-cool, able (and willing) to lock tongues with the wildest of chicks: from Sherilyn Fenn, to Winona Ryder, to Kate Moss.

Even though Depp famously cleaned up and calmed down when he met and started a family with French singer Vanessa Paradis in 1998, his move to Paris cemented his reputation as a Hollywood outsider.

He retained his louche and edgy aura seeking out work that was challenging, unusual, or downright odd. His later choices, such as The Libertine and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, seemed just as weird and wonderful as his earliest work on Cry-Baby and Edward Scissorhands, and he remains a defiantly shameless experimenter onscreen.

What a surprise, then, to find the 43-year-old Depp fretting over a screen kiss with 20-year-old Keira Knightley in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, the second instalment in a fully-fledged Disney blockbuster franchise.

'Kissing someone you are not romantically involved with is always awkward,' he smiles, 'but the fact that Keira is twentysomething years younger than me made it infinitely more awkward. Still, she was a good sport about it and we did what we had to do.'

Embarrassed as the dad-of-two clearly is, the kiss continues the romantic dynamic of the first Pirates film, The Curse of the Black Pearl. There, the unpredictable behaviour of Depp's Captain Jack Sparrow, caroming from drunken tomfoolery to potent sexual threat, livened up the rather insipid romance between Knightley's prim Elizabeth Swann and Orlando Bloom's upright Will Turner.

Indeed, Depp was by far the best and most interesting thing in a movie famously based on a theme park ride, and his reading of Sparrow - 'a cross between Keith Richards and Pepe Le Pew' - was a bold one for a blockbuster.

'They were scared I was ruining the movie,' says Depp now, painting a picture of panicked Disney executives scrambling for their calculators at the sight and sound of Sparrow's wild hair, gold teeth (both of which he's still sporting for our meeting) and extraordinary mockney mumble. They calmed down once the film grossed $650 million.

'We weren't getting the panicked phone calls [on the sequel],' says Depp. 'That definitely gave me more confidence.' Indeed, Keith Richards has been signed up for a cameo to play Jack Sparrow's father in the third Pirates movie, which went into production the moment the relentless, action-and-effects-laden second film had wrapped.

I ask Depp if his qualms about the new film and its love scene have less to do with cradle-snatching than with the feeling he has sold out. After all, his animatronic effigy has been added to the Disneyland Pirates ride, he lent his voice and image to the video game of the film, and he'll earn $20 million for each of the Pirates sequels, with more from merchandising.

'I don't regret any of it,' he says. 'I didn't feel like I'd explored all the particular possibilities of Captain Jack and I didn't want to say goodbye to him.'

Jack Sparrow may have been the first role for which he was Oscar-nominated, but still, who would have thought that Johnny Depp would be part of a theme park ride? 'My kids get to go to Disneyland a little more often than other kids, but that's part of the gig,' he says.

Still, he is rather surprised by this turn in his career. 'When the ride took this particular turn, I was shocked, and I am still shocked,' he concedes. 'It doesn't make sense to me.'

There does seem an element of happenstance to Depp's career. Born in Kentucky in 1963, and raised in Florida, he dropped out of school at 15 in the hope of making it as a rock musician, playing in various bands - one of which, The Kids, once opened for Iggy Pop.

He only got into acting when Lori Jane Allison - the wife he married at 20 and divorced at 22 - introduced him to Nicolas Cage.

He made an unremarkable film debut, aged 21, in A Nightmare on Elm Street in 1984, but despite success on the TV series 21 Jump Street, he didn't achieve big-screen fame until his twisted teen-idol role in John Waters's Cry-Baby in 1990 led to the bizarre fable Edward Scissorhands, a relationship with co-star Winona Ryder, and a long professional collaboration with director Tim Burton. The attention, both professional and romantic, took him by surprise. Which is where the hell-raising reputation was born.

'It took me a long time to get used to being looked at or pointed at all the time,' he told me in an earlier interview. 'I felt I had been turned into a novelty and I was so nervous and uncomfortable that I just drank my guts out. It took me a number of years to grow up.'

He turned down the lead roles in Interview With a Vampire and Speed in favour of peculiarities such as Benny and Joon and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. When he and Ryder broke up he had his 'Winona Forever' tattoo altered to read 'Wino Forever', and later there were reports of him and Kate Moss filling a bath with champagne in a Portobello hotel.

Time might have been called on his period of excess when River Phoenix died outside Depp's Hollywood club The Viper Room in 1993, but he didn't actually stop until he met Paradis in 1998. Their first child, Lily-Rose was born in 1999, their son Jack in 2002.

'More than anything, the thing that gave me real perspective and understanding and a very strong foundation was getting together with Vanessa,' says Depp.

So secure is he in the relationship with Paradis, he has been able to talk warmly and compassionately in the past couple of years about the troubles besetting his former loves Ryder and Moss, calling the latter 'a great, lovely, sweet, pure girl'.

Fatherhood, he adds, helped to change his life and his attitudes. 'I never really go out much, and my kids have a super-normal life. They do their school. They play with their friends.'

He warms to the theme of normality. 'The kiddies are a high-energy, high-stakes experience. It's never boring. My daughter is now exiting the Barbie period and moving into fashion accessories and real teenage stuff, which is unbelievable to witness. My boy Jack is still a blessing. He's discovered superheroes and comic books, which is really fun.'

The family live between Paris and Los Angeles, but their careers often pull them apart. Depp's shooting schedule for the two Pirates sequels involved 200 days in the Caribbean last year, with more to come later in 2006, while Paradis still acts in French films, records music and tours in Europe.

'We know that as much time as we spend with our kids, we have to take time for ourselves, too,' he says. 'I mean, you've got to remain not only lovers but friends, and not just talk about the kids.'

If things get too tough, they can always flee to the paradise island that Depp bought in 2004 in the Bahamas. '[The island] is a very necessary part of the balance,' he explains. 'The world out here in Hollywood is one type of animal, while the island is a place with no telephones, no cars or street lights or noise.

'It brings things down to their absolute base level and is just as simple as things can get. It also gives the kids a great education in ocean life, builds their confidence.'

Was Pirates their toughest separation? 'The toughest time for us actually was probably more the toughest time for me,' he says candidly. 'A few years ago, my daughter was just under two and Vanessa had a concert tour to do and we didn't have a nanny, so I was tour daddy. We travelled by bus and watched The Wizard of Oz 7,000 times and I was just being poppa while Vanessa rehearsed and went on stage and all that.

'But I had the distinct impression that Lily Rose wanted to spend more time with Vanessa, so it was a great challenge for me as a dad to entertain the two-year-old. That was tough. I got through it, though, and so did she.'

Paradis is currently working on a new album, which Depp says is 'really promising. It's hard to listen to a couple of the tracks because I turn into an infant and get all weepy-eyed.'

And, as if to counter any suggestion he's selling out with Pirates, he's embarking on a film of Stephen Sondheim's stage musical Sweeney Todd with old friend Tim Burton, which represents at least one major new challenge.

'On Sweeney Todd, there will be the singing,' he says. 'I don't want to shock anyone, but I am not a singer. However, I think it's important for me to try stuff and I will definitely work with a vocal coach and give it a shot. I don't think it's good to get comfortable. The idea of being comfortable is not that you get bored but that you get lazy. That's not good.'

Then there's his labour-of-love project Shantaram, the adaptation of Gregory David Roberts's 944-page memoir, which Depp will produce and star in. Depp was so enthusiastic about the book that he persuaded Warner Bros to buy the rights for $2 million.

Roberts was an Australian heroin addict sent to prison for armed robbery, who escaped, fled to India, where he reinvented himself as a doctor in the slums of Bombay, and ended up fighting Russian troops in Afghanistan.

The film suffered a setback recently when Peter Weir, the director of Master and Commander and Dead Poets Society, walked off the project over differences with Depp. The two had different visions of what the film should be, according to a statement issued at the time.

Depp tells me it's a shame that Weir left and that he thinks Weir is a brilliant director. He urges me to read the book. 'It's quite a ride,' he enthuses.

The prospect of Depp producing Shantaram as well as acting in it suggests that he is looking to control his destiny more closely in the future.

'I never really thought about where any of it was going. I always wanted to be able to get to the place someday where I look back and say I did all right. I'm proud. I didn't sell out. One day I want my kids to be able to look back and say: 'You know, pop, you did well. You did well.'